


Byssus

by fleece



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Merpeople, Body Dysphoria, Body Horror, Canon-Typical Violence, F/F, Fantasy California, Gender Dysphoria, Underwater
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-13
Updated: 2020-04-13
Packaged: 2021-03-02 00:02:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 20,641
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23625832
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fleece/pseuds/fleece
Summary: When you reach the bottom of the dark, you see a mermaid, presumably the Witch of Life, Heiress to the Sea. Her human half emerges out of the wall of black water at the end of the path. She holds a double-ended trident and what looks like a metalweighted net, her arms lit with white ley lines which flare off of a truly ridiculous amount of gold. She’s kind of huge and looks much older than you. It’s hot.“They’ve not sent a landdweller before,” the mermaid says. “Are you here for my crown?”Jade, experimenting with magic, accidentally transforms herself and her dog. She seeks the aid of the witch at the bottom of the ocean, who could use a little help of her own.
Relationships: Jade Harley/Feferi Peixes
Comments: 9
Kudos: 15





	Byssus

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings for violence, body horror, and body/gender dysphoria, among other heavy themes.

Like so many things, it began with an accident.

For you liked to know things! What a marvel, how the length of the hairs on a leaf indicated the difference in properties between two forest herbs. How your heart brimmed with joy when you found river water better for this potion or that than the lake’s. Or, which expression effective for making a village woman smile (there’s someone you like, it’s hardly worth mentioning).

You live in a cottage at the edge of a mountain village where the snow in winter is not too deep and the heat in summer not too harsh. Bec led you here when you were younger, driven by your bitter tears and loneliness. He has always helped to take care of you. You love him very much, even if he digs up your seedlings and tries to eat all your raspberries.

Your life as a witch satisfies you so you are very productive. From what you have gathered, many witches of small communities are happy to maintain the old ways and ensure their survival, but you were not raised only to survive. Your grandpa traveled the world in order to record as many modes of magic as he could, even if he could not practice or even perceive them! So, in that exploratory spirit, you try to make new spells and potions in order to help who you can. You hope that, wherever your grandpa is now, he would feel honored by and proud of your attempts.

You have a crystal in suspension between your hands when you hear a familiar snuffle.

“Bec, don’t you dare!” you try. “You are NOT supposed to be in here when I’ve activated an experiment and you KNOW it, mister!”

Your dog, catastrophically, takes this as an invitation to try and love bomb you and leaps at your back.

“Bec- no-” You stumble. The crystal you were levitating plummets to the ground even as you grab for it. The translucent stone cracks with a noise like gunfire though the floor is only soft dirt.

You feel a wind. All the hair on your head rises. Your teeth are clattering. You think, suddenly, what blood there is in my body must also be in others—

There are stars overhead. It was just late afternoon, though, light streaming through your windows. You feel fur in your hand and look down at it- it’s a fistful which must have come from Bec. Fuck, did you hurt him? Your hand feels different somehow.

A whimper catches your attention, and you turn your gaze in front of you. You notice it is near ocean-black night and you shouldn’t be able to see at the same time you realize there’s a pretty woman sprawled in front of you, clutching a bloody arm.

“You can’t be her,” she whispers, trying to crawl backwards. “You killed them?” You think you know this person. As you open your mouth to reply, blood bursts in your mouth. Fangs that you can’t feel the whole shape of split open your tongue.

You reach out a hand instead, but your apparent claws startle you and the woman starts screaming for help. There is an answering growl and you whip around, looking for Bec. He isn’t there- instead a huge monster twice his size stands on the forest edge, snarling but silent. You realize the growl is coming from the throat in this body you’re not sure is yours.

You flee the village. You fly past the waterwheel, the central square, the sheep pens. You hear people crying out, lights being lit. Maybe-Bec follows with a grim relentlessness that prevents any attempt at subterfuge on your part, or any delay. You cry like a beast as you run, from your garden, your village, your life.

The forest is thick. Branches whip past and cut your face. Partly because of your tears but mostly the disorientation in your senses—you can smell things you never imagined before, your hearing is jarringly doubled—your pounding steps are careless and you fall down an embankment. A rock hits your head with a crack that rings out.

You don’t think you faint. You lie there, stunned, your nose quivering with scents on the wind, as the air grows first light then warm. At some point you realize it’s less your injury and more the refusal to acknowledge what has happened.

Finally, you sit up. There’s a thick crust on your face which is probably all blood. Hopefully it’s all yours. You try to scrape it off with your hands (also bloodied) but only manage to slice a gash in your cheek. You have claws now? You also figure out there’s another pair of ears on your head. They seem to have sprouted up through your hair. You were always good at growing things, you guess.

At least you still have your molars. The teeth in the front of your mouth have all but transformed it into a canine’s. You don’t want to ruin your tongue any further.

The dress and the body under it is definitely yours. Long legs, small chest, dark hair, dark skin. You don’t want to believe it, but overall you’re mostly the same. Hairier, definitely. Angrier. Why do you feel so angry?

Before, it was usually crashing noises around the house and a glimpse of his white fur in your peripheral vision that alerted you to your companion's presence. Today, you smell him. There's an analytical part of your mind that wonders how you know it's him, and not, say, any other dog, but your instincts are flaring and nearly snuff all your thoughts out.

You stagger to your feet. The pain in your head fights you as you take one step, then two. You manage a trot through the pines, interrupted at intervals by taking several slanting falls on the slippery needles sponge-thick on the ground. All your ears sing out in choir.

You come across Bec in a small clearing. First you see the white flowers of little prince's pine, and the cheerful spread of pink and purple catpaws. Then you see the bodies.

There's no way you couldn't have smelled this stench earlier even with just human ability- maybe your pain was distracting you. There's a pile of ravaged animals crowning the evergreen needles and wildflowers and little clumps of grasses. At the bottom of what seems to be mostly deer you think you see the dark coat of a bear.

At the top, there is no mistake. Bec was always a large dog. Where he was hip-high before you think now he might reach your waist, maybe even your chest. His white muzzle is stained black. His whole head and a good portion of his body is matted with blood. Though his posture is relaxed, his ears are alert and his eyes are trained right onto yours. There's a different sort of light to them than normal. Soft brown before, they are now bright green like yours. You feel as if you're looking into the blazing sun of a different world.

Out of nowhere, fury floods your nerves. You flex your hands and start to howl. He casually leaps down from the mess of death to sing along with you. His teeth are enormous. You're scared, and you only get louder.

He makes a lunge at you.

You stop howling and just start fucking screaming, because you're definitely going to die now. Peak and pit, this is how you die, eaten by your own dog, whom you love, but who you've inadvertently turned into a terrifying monster that probably would have savaged everybody in the village if you hadn't left.

He stops short of you by a few feet and just snarls in your face. He's drooling, which means that huge globs of pink are falling from his fangs.

You're not going to hurt me, right? you think to him, unable to speak, wanting to cry.

He looks like he really wants to but can't bring himself to. The green in his eyes is flickering violently. You wonder if yours are too; the hair on your arms and neck is standing straight up, and you're pretty sure your head hair would be too if it weren't so heavy and long.

He finally stops snarling and just looks at you with a mean gaze. You're shaking, palms shredded because your fists have been trembling along with the rest of your body. 

You gesture wildly at him, growling, not even knowing what you're trying to convey to this monster-dog: perhaps your despair? You want to blame him, but it's not even his fault. It was definitely your arrogance: thinking you could do magic so much better than anyone else. what a witch, after all!

You reach out a hand to- you don't even know! it's not like you're going to pet him. Maybe take a hold of his scruff and shake him, snap him out of it somehow. But before you can get close, he makes a half-hearted snap at you and then tears out of the clearing.

You can't do anything for the animals, you think. You're too exhausted. Maybe Bec will come back and gorge himself later; he never passed up the opportunity to steal the share of meat you’d get in thanks for helping with lambing, or any creatures you'd trap yourself. It would probably be prudent for you to at least try and harvest some of the deer, but you can't bring yourself to see if any of the kills are clean. It's too sad.

You have to get a hold of yourself. Before you can break down into tears or burst out into another howl, you hobble away from the bodies and walk several hundred meters out through the trees. You rest under the auspices of a mountain maple, its leaves broad and kind.

So, for certain, you have to stay away from people. You know now there is no way you can go back to the village, to try and help the woman you hurt, the others you— or Bec— to try to explain— you expect, if Bec does not kill you, to have no home. They will call you no mere green witch, but a sorceress— they will call you and your wolf two howls of evil in the night. If they think you a threat now, with your wicked familiar, they might track you down to kill you, and then you would have to defend yourself. You would win.

You can't survive well going further up the mountain, you think, the air too thin and resources too sparse. You are no wise bristlecone. You almost wish you were; your only worry would be the wind. So you suppose your only choice is to head down into the valley. There are more people there, but if you avoid the right parts of the floodplain, you can avoid the densest populations. Even without knowing what you did—what happened, you do look like a werewolf, or worse. Something out of a tale to scare children.

While you contemplate your prospects, you’ve been absentmindedly licking your wounded hands. They already look better, the cuts beginning to close. Come to think of it, that fall last night probably should have killed you. You’re glad it didn’t! You get up, brushing needles off of your dress and your copious amounts of leg hair. Only one thing to do for now: walk downhill. Completely achievable, and hopefully navigation over difficult terrain will distract you enough from more thoughts about what a monster you are.

You don’t get very far before you have to rest. Though your palms no longer even have scabs on them and your head has no wound at all, you’re exhausted. You sleep. At least a day—the air feels different, wetter. You hope it doesn’t rain. Then again, if it did, you could wash off some of this blood, and your hair is heavy with soil.

With some relief you wade into a small stream you come across. You have to lay down to wash yourself because the water is low. When you feel your skin and hair are a little cleaner, you stop to take a better look at yourself in the still water pooling by the bank.

There’s bags under your eyes and already stubble on your cheeks. You’ve been hairy your whole life, and an application of a blade every now and then won’t hurt your face any more than previous shaves have. Luckily you had your knife in its holster on your leg. Unluckily, it’s your serrated knife and won’t do you much good for hair removal. Whatever, it’s been a while since you’ve grown a beard. Maybe the novelty will endear it to you.

Maybe having a beard will make you look less like a wolf-woman? You don’t know if you’d let anyone see you like this even if you weren’t afraid of being attacked. You think if you were going to transform into anything, at least a bunny or jackrabbit would have suited your name. The claws would be both convenient (for digging up corms) and inconvenient (for scratching your face. Okay, any part of your body). The teeth you can live with. The ears are...fluffy. 

Part of you is relieved you’re rationalizing the changes. Part of you is afraid you’ll get too used to them.

The irritability comes out of nowhere, which frustrates you even further. Birdsong that would previously cheer you now stirs coals in your chest. Burrs tangled in your socks will cause flickers and little licks of fire in your belly. It's all so maddening. These things don't even matter! Or, you guess you've just tried to never let little things like that bother you. After being orphaned and having to find a new home so many times, what are these small things? Just parts of nature you wish you could appreciate but sets your wolf-senses blazing.

In an attempt to reaffirm your humanity, you begin talking to yourself.

“So it probably didn’t help that it was sunset,” you admit. “We’ve always known times of significance can amplify the effects of magic!” It’s weird hearing your own voice again. You’ve been growling a lot when you sense Bec near you. It’s fucking exhausting. He’s definitely stalking you.

“And it’s not exactly that I’m lonely,” you lie, lyingly. “It’s just been so long since I’ve been alone.”

Bec would usually be right by your side, probably begging for food or trying to walk between your legs. Instead you hear him howl in the distance and feel afraid.

You're surely down many hundreds of meters from where the village was. It’s warmer already, and the rigidity of the firs and rippling of aspen from higher hillsides have given way to the ambling of blue oak and the airiness of grey pine.

You’re hungry now, so you stop aiming for the valley and start walking in whatever direction your nose points you. You dig up wild onion and shred miner's lettuce as best as you can with your mess of a maw. Mushrooms have always worried you, but hunger drives you to eat enough that you feel a little more secure in your identification skills. That or your new body is capable of processing poison.

Maybe poison is already infused in your veins. Your body has no need anymore to fight it.

“It’s gonna be ok,” you say to yourself. “You’ve coped before.”

Before it is even night you want to rest. You burrow into dry duff at the base of, ironically, a dogwood, and fall asleep nearly instantly. In the morning you are wet and miserable. Luckily you find a good chunk of white quartz after a search that does not take too long; with this you make a little fire with which you roast some camas bulbs and burn some fiddleheads. It’s incredible what the food does to cheer you up.

You make it down into the valley after a lot of hiking, foraging, and napping. You can barely breathe from the heat. You don’t know how anyone survives down here. They surely don’t. Except right away you nearly stumble into a family traveling on what you assumed was just a deer path. Before they notice you, you manage to creep away. They were chatting happily about a summer festival at a nearby village; best to be really careful. You resolve to be sneaky and light your fires only in the day.

You spend a week mucking around in the valley. (Maybe longer? Without a daily routine and speaking with other people, keeping track of time is really confusing.) The lowlands, though despicably hot, are abundant with food. You gorge yourself on blackberries, cook cattail shoots, dig up corms from yarrow and bulbs from lilies. You find you’re quick enough now to catch fish in the river and quail out of shrubs. Though your claws would work, you use your knife to feel less of an animal. Scratching out fires with your sharp piece of quartz helps too. What other creature can produce a fire but a human? Besides elemental sprites, you concede to yourself in your head.

Finally you tire of avoiding roads and villages and decide to head for the coast.

Besides the trading cities at river outlets, the shoreline is sparsely populated. You assume it’s because of the common incursions of territorial mermaids and remnants of ancient magic that make most humans extremely uncomfortable. But you were found here, and became a witch besides. When you smell the salt on the air you can’t help but feel at home.

It’s been so many years—25, 30? You’re a sapling no longer. But from your nursery days you still have memories: the windswept cypresses you remember, and the flush of lupine on the gentle hillsides you know you are fond of. There’s a point on the shore where cliffs of dark rock rise. It’s foggy today, so you can’t quite see it, but your dog ears tilt to where you’re sure you spent your childhood. You see the tower in your memory, the castle banners, the gates.

An afternoon moving through sage scrub sees you out onto a sandy path when the sun is barely starting to dip down. Your exhausted shoes crunch against grains of soil. You’re tired, too. The cold has settled on your skin.

A shift in the mist reveals a grey sky and the impressive height of your old home. The gates swing open with some persuasion from your weight and you walk slowly up the slate-paved entrance. When you pull open the doors you are surprised by the faint smell of your grandpa. No one must have come since you abandoned this place. You know not where your feet are taking you until you open the door to your grandfather’s rooms and realize your nose was guiding you to where the scent was strongest.  
Deep breaths help you not to cry. You can smell that unguent he always used on his hands and the smoke of his pipe. Your heart aches—quick, you need to distract yourself.

Since the novelty of a beard did not make having one any more appealing, the first thing you do is navigate straight to your grandpa’s dressing room and wipe the dust off of the mirror, so you can take his old blade and shave your face. It takes some time because while the blade was on the vanity, the leather strap needed to sharpen it was missing. You hunt for it, eventually find it hanging behind the mirror, take a subjective eternity to strop the blade, and finally shave the unruly tangles of facial hair you’ve sprouted. You immediately feel incredible. For a second you think about taking the blade to your new ears as well, but you decide that’s extreme and unnecessary, considering they’re actually kind of cute. Also your hearing is awesome now.

You wander into his bedroom. The four poster bed is there, with its ridiculously patterned curtains. Tapestries depicting hunting scenes cover the walls. One is of a beach swarming in huge white beasts. When you were little you liked to look for Bec—surely there would be a white dog amongst the centaurs and fairy bulls. Out of habit you look for him now, shining and made of thread, but there is no white dog.

Then you venture into Grandpa’s study. There is a big window in front of his desk that illuminates the room, though dimly for the clouds. A few bookshelves line the opposite wall. Most of his collection was kept in the library. You drag your fingertips along a spine or two and wipe away stripes of dust. On his desk you find papers still scattered about, his quill not on its stand but in an open ink well which must by now be dry. Looking closer, you see that he was even mid-sentence in his notes.  
He really did just leave you.

Not knowing what to do, you return to his dressing room. You sit on his chair and take some time to marvel at how everything is as you once knew. It must be the old wards are still up. You can’t imagine all these supplies going untouched and shelter untaken here. The wards always admitted just you and Bec—you stand quickly. That needs to be changed, now.

You breathe on the mirror and the moisture coalesces. With your clawtips you draw in the condensation lines to expel wickedness. You exhale over it again, wipe it out, and clap firmly three times. There’s a giant electric crackle as the modification activates. You exhale once more, this time with relief instead of intent.

You spend a day or two sleeping your journey off. Buried in your grandpa’s blankets, you finally take some time to cry. Though you absolutely hate it, and can’t help but think yourself weak and stupid and worthless, you do feel better afterward. Then practical matters force you back out of bed.

The castle is ancient. Even with your grandpa’s steady wards, wind and rain still penetrate the stone and wood. Your dress, though thick make for a mountain’s thin summer, has been shredded from your wilderness travels, and you can’t stay in Grandpa’s bed for the rest of your life. You’re cold, dammit!

You look in your grandpa’s wardrobe and are a little surprised to find all the clothes in good condition. You’re a little less surprised after you consider he did traipse about the continent’s wilds, and therefore would be prepared for all manner of difficulties. He probably spelled everything after buying them. He’d never weave cloth for himself even though that would make the enchantments stronger; the only time he picked up an awl or a needle was when he wanted to bind clean copies of his notes.  
Something else that surprises you: the garments are tight around your shoulders, and short in the ankle besides. You’d never imagine you’d grow taller than Grandpa. In your memories he cuts an imposing figure, towering over you or tossing you miles up to his eye level.

You uncuff the pants, decide to wear the shirts with some open buttons, and redo most of the paneling in a the coats within a couple of days. Though your needlecraft was always poor, you’re determined not to look foolish, if you already must dress like a man, and you find great satisfaction in ripping out seams with your claws. They pop and snap.

Looking in the mirror, seeing a bit of him in your face, you miss your grandpa. Howls drift in over the castle walls and you miss Bec.

Your dog, now in devil’s form, seems to take pleasure in piling up the ravaged bodies outside the castle gates. So far it seems to be mostly tule elk that did not run swiftly and seals foolish enough to rest on the beaches here. You’re just trying to be grateful he hasn’t left you any people. Bec has yet to wander far enough from you to find any villages. You hope he does not. There are some nearby coastal towns that would provide plenty of flesh for him to tear. If he really wants to upset you, he’d probably go for it.

It takes a few more days for your normal good sense to finally return. You spend them fishing and gathering food from plants, thinking the whole while on how you might do something to make Bec a normal dog again.

With the steady resolve of a resourceful witch, you head into Grandpa’s library in order to do research. Some of his books are ancient, while others are merely old, and many are bound and written by his own hand. While you respect his great body of work, you rather think the most powerful magics will be in the oldest records.

You pull out likely looking candidates and begin to stack them on his writing desk. As you tilt one book off of the shelf, it flaps open and something falls from the pages. It’s sparkly; you feel like a magpie diving for it. It feels like nothing, lighter than a feather, which explains its fluttering only vaguely downward.

After marking the place it held in the book, you hold the small piece of cloth up to the light from a window. It’s a very loose and open weave which makes it quite net-like. It strikes you with its gold color. You feel as if you are holding sunshine itself, or a warm breeze. Even its scent is nice. Something about it is very familiar. Maybe you played with it as a child?

You head over to your grandpa’s old reading chair, only slightly moth-eaten, and curl up in it. The book at the place you marked tells a tale of sea silk, a material made from the fleece of a golden sheep that lived underwater. It claims a blanket of sea silk could be pulled through a ring, that one could wear a cloak of it and be warm, yet feel one was wearing nothing. A spear with a sea silk tassel could pierce clear through an oak. A necklace woven with it could command any person to loyalty. The book says, “Humans have forgotten its origin, and no pieces survive, at least on land. Perhaps the golden fleece is just a myth?”

Rubbing the cloth between your fingers, you feel as if you are touching the petal of a rose newly in bloom. Suddenly you recall your grandpa spinning you a tale. “There’s an ancient witch who lives under the ocean,” he told you. He was sitting in this very chair, and you were squirming out of his arms. His words had stilled you. “In the inkiest depths she tends to her golden flock of sea-sheep and spins their golden fleece. She is the Witch of Life, Heiress to the Sea, and she holds immense power in the ocean.”

It occurs to you that your grandpa’s words were true. You’re not sure why you feel so convinced of this. You think you were the one who showed the cloth to your grandpa in the first place. You mine in your head but can’t remember where you found it. A necklace that commands loyalty...If you can find the sea witch, and beg her to help you- she could weave a collar for Bec! He could be brought back to normal.

So you can’t afford to not believe in her existence. “Under the ocean” probably just means she’s a mermaid, and no one knows where in the waters they nest, only that they come ashore to pillage and wage war. A witch could very well be at the bottom of the ocean.

You look in you grandpa’s other books for potions to help you breathe water. Even though you don’t think that’ll work for as long as you’d need, and you’re not a great swimmer even in still and shallow water. An idea comes to you as you search the library. You almost dare not trust yourself, after what happened last time, but you’ve always been a little (read: pretty) reckless and the spectre of your demon dog can’t stop you. And if everything works out, he’ll be a normal dog again anyway!  
Sitting at Grandpa’s desk scribbling a list of ingredients modified from one of his books, you remember your grandpa doing much of the same. When he was even around, anyway- he was often gone for days, sometimes even weeks. You were fine, mostly. There was plenty of food and you didn’t stray too far from the tower and Bec watched over you.

While you're debating the various merits and failings of your grandfather's raising of you, you find his gun cabinet, expensive in glass and carvings. Another merit, at least: it's locked. You walk all the way to the entrance of the castle to find a good rock, walk all the way back up to his room, and then bash the lock open with the rock. It’s very satisfying. You feel the best you have in days!

You haven't handled guns much since you left, and in your adulthood they were mostly shitty pistols that misfired or didn't fire at all, so picking up his rifles feels very weird. You don't feel powerful holding them. Mostly you just feel afraid.

But, shooting a bullet into the sea is probably the least destructive thing you could do with a gun. Plus, considering you'll be interacting with at least one mermaid, having a one is probably a better defense than your knives, and definitely safer than your claws. You do not want to get into the reach of any seadweller. Their strength is legendary.

Sorting through the guns, you're pretty sure that the rifle with the engravings of, big surprise, more rifles, is his favorite. The etching of “custodiet nobis” and waves along the barrel you’re pretty sure are enchantments to protect against decay from the sea air. Even with that, you’re still happy to find the gun doesn’t seem to need much maintenance before you can use again. You feel more relief still when you rummage through the bottom of the cabinet and find an old can of oil that’s still sealed. You did not relish the prospect of harvesting stars only know how many blue flax seeds and pressing the oil out.

You haven’t gone diving since you were very young. Grandpa had forbade it. The ocean was too dangerous, “and you’re a wee bit of flotsam with barely a tooth or claw to protect yourself,” he had said when you whined. He always laughed and said later, when you’re older. “I’ll teach you every eel and all their hiding spots,” he promised. “No seaweed will be unknown to my Jade!” But then he disappeared.

You’re convinced it wasn’t his fault. He never would have left you for no reason. You were so little then!  
And it’s not like you didn’t learn anything. You’d watch him dive, and he’d talk about what he did or didn’t do, and you swam out in the waves anyway. He was old; prone to naps and confusion. Frankly, he was just irresponsible! You don’t know if you’d let a little girl handle your rifles, now that you’re an adult. Well, you’re sure he did the best he could.

Your first strokes in the cold, heavy water are awful. A wave tumbles you and every sense fails you. It’s a devastating amount of noise, your mouth and nose are filled with salt and sand, you can only see grainy brown, there’s no way to tell where is up, you can’t seem to control any of your limbs. Finally the water settles and you burst, spitting wildly, through its surface. You run—as well as anyone can really run through waist-high water—until you hit dry sand, and then you fall to soak up all its warmth. 

You try again the next day, too humiliated for an immediate return to the water. This time goes markedly better. When you feel dry sand under your feet again, your bag is stuffed with kelp and you have a handful of sand from maybe thirty feet down. A few more tries and you have some seaweed holdfasts, not just surface samples.

Since the seals that Bec likes to leave you he just eats later anyway, you comb the coastline for some of the bloated corpses that wash up every now and then. You’re lucky and some miles away from the castle find the rotting body of a deep sea whale. You think maybe it has exploded? Flesh and innards of dubious solidity are all over the rocks. You were hoping to carve out some bone but make do with jarring some skin and blubber. It is intensely disgusting. You definitely throw up.

You go back and look through all the boxes in the gun cabinet and find a few silver bullets. Grandpa never could pass up a bit of demon hunting. One of those will work very well.

His instructions for cleaning a rifle come back to you quite clearly; you often begged to be allowed to. You boil water. Some you use to make rose hip tea which you drink. The rest you mix with soap and use to rinse out the barrel of the gun, after you forget which cup is which and accidentally swallow some of the cleaning solution. You take the rod and affix the tow to it and scrape out the inside of the barrel. You dry it with some linen and then rub oil over the metal.

Once you finish you reward yourself with a practice shot and find the gun works but your aim is, and you mentally apologize to Bec for thinking it, dogshit. The ocean is your target though, so you think you’ll be fine.

You’re almost ready. You pack some preserves and extra clothes and some supplies in a bag, reinforce your coat because you’re going to be leaving the auspices of the sun, and get a good night’s sleep.

You scrounge up a little cauldron out of an ancient storeroom and half fill it with seawater. Into that you throw the mucky sand, the seaweed anchors, and the whale...parts. Heating it only makes all of it smell worse. Your gag reflex pleads with you to abandon the project, but you suppress it and start reading aloud the incantation for breathing air from water out of _Forgotten Arts of the Sea instead_. The cauldron croaks, then suddenly the fire you lit underneath it goes out. Frost blooms all over the cauldron. The liquid in it ices over.

You break the ice with your knife and drop the bullet in. Normally you’d let it marinate for a month, for the extra power, but you can’t in good conscience wait that long, so you fish it out immediately and dry it with the sea silk. You’re a little disappointed there is no obvious indication the bullet changed. Still, it should work. It will work! You are a strong witch.

As long as you’re not putting things off- you sling on your bag and pick up your grandfather’s favorite rifle, now gleaming with your care. You leave the castle to march straight down to the nearest beach. You load the gun. You hear a noise that isn’t waves breaking and out of the corner of your eye see white, brighter than the sand of the beach. Bec has come to watch you. He’s snarling, as if the curse senses that you intend to rid it from his body. Slowly, he comes to stand between you and the water.

That won’t do. You fire the rifle over him.

Instantaneously and with great noise the water rises around the path of the bullet. You run into the tear in the ocean, your heart pounding and ears ringing. When you find yourself not mauled, you look back. Demons the sea people might seem, but you think whatever possesses Bec abides by the same rules demons do, and he cannot enter the great waters the mermaids inhabit. So you walk down the steep path alone.

The waters around you are green and glassy. Light breaks through it like through crystal. Fish, curious, swim close to you and cast shadows on your body. You put your arm into the water and they dart away. Within some minutes of walking downward, it becomes quite dark. Some sunlight filters down the split in the water as if you were walking in a deep rock canyon. The air is cold, and your are glad for your coat.

You walk ever downwards, possibly for hours, tugging your coat around you and chewing on rose hips. Barely any sun reaches you, now, and the water is dark and thick. You see flashes of light sometimes from creatures unknown to you.

You descend.

* * *

You wake with a sudden jerk for your trident, like always. Like always, you only still when its weight is heavy in your grip, and, like always, you are embarrassed of your thrashing. You sense nothing with ill-intent—your lateral line was always good at reading people, even if you didn’t always listen.

Putting your trident down, you take a few deep breaths. The water gushing through the gills in your sides calms you. During your sleep cycle you only wear the fine byssus mesh bodysuit, but the whole of your waking hours you have plate on and it restricts your gill capacity. That’s fine; you’d rather be short of breath than dead.

You always sleep in your shellcoon. When you were younger you’d sleep outside the palace in sand or among stone, wanting to feel the rhythms of the sea. Now you feel the cold of the abyss just thinking of how vulnerable you must have been. The giant clam shell is big enough to fit both your body and your trident if you curl up a bit, thick enough to afford good protection, and, most importantly, can nearly close.

Pushing it open, you see some of your favorite cuttlefish were waiting for you. They flash different patterns. It cheers you up.

“Hi babes,” you say. “I’m gonna get ready now, ok?”

You bring your trident to your mirrored room. Little pearl lights of different colors make the glass sparkle. The cuttlefish which followed you dart about, imitating the lights. A couple graze on the little crustaceans that like to hide among your cultivated funguses. You like to keep those because they’re white and remind you of your mom.

Her whispers feel a little agitated today. You’ll visit her shortly. For a while you’ve been avoiding her, because as long as she’s quiet that’s all that really matters.

Great, now you feel guilty because you don’t love your mom enough because you’ve been burdened by suppressing her voice that when raised would kill all mermaids but you’ve been killing mermaids to suppress her voice anyway because mermaids keep trying to kill you. Glub!

Plus she’ll complain if you don’t look your best. You sit down on your round court-of-pearl stool and begin considering yourself.

The only time you’ve seen The Right Hand of Light, Her Imperial Condescension, is when you were formally presented to the seadweller empire and given the title of The Left Hand of Darkness, Her Royal Condescenscion, which you don’t think makes great sense as a pun because there are no trees in the sea. You could tell your sister was not only more powerful than any ocean current but the absolute pinnacle of beauty besides. In comparison, you seem starved and weak. Your skin does not glow scar-grey but is more like seal skin with the spots and all. Your irises have not filled in their color and the yellows are not even bright enough to attract a shark. The Empress does not wear her hair as you do, in braids; she flaunts her power by leaving it free. No one would survive touching it, let alone attacking her at all. For you it’s not such a sure thing.

You inspect your hair carefully. Seems like it’s ok for a while longer in the braids. You know for the sake of safety that shaving it would be better, but for both vanity and a desire to please your mom you leave it as long as it is. Even if it takes hours and hours to do. Lining your eyes and putting lipstick on only takes a minute. Good to remind anyone that sees you of the imperial colors, especially because they’ll probably be trying to assassinate you and you want to use everything possible to intimidate them. You put your circlet in its place; you slip on your bracelets. They’re not loose enough to get caught on anything and they’ll act as vambraces in a pinch.

You breathe deeply for a while before you finally struggle into your fitted chestplate. Your tunic goes over that. Its embroidery is all by your hand, tight filigree patterns in byssus and dyed strands of your hair, symbols for strength, speed, and stamina. Looking in the mirror, you think you do your mom proud, even if you are not the Empress.

Before you show off to Gl’bgolyb is a good time to check on the perimeter threads, actually. You strap your trident to your back and gather a few materials. On second thought, you also fetch your weighted net and tie it around your waist. Despite your body feeling dragged down, your heart feels a little lighter. If anyone does manage to disable or kill you, at least you’ll have given them a fierce struggle in return. If they disarm you of your trident, you can slow them down with the net and strike with your dagger. If they cut the net and break the dagger, you can rip with your claws and teeth. It’s come that close, before. You are not going to risk it.

You greet all the animals you swim past, as you do every day. The cephalopods are friendly! The echinoderms are not. It’s not their fault, though, they’re stupid little things no matter how fond of them you are. No mammals hanging out right now. You long for a cuddle with a seal. But your work is more important right now anyway. You quit fucking around with your friends and leave your palace.

In the great dark you rely mainly on your tail’s lateral line and your electroreceptivity. Nothing around your size is nearby, so you swim out to the closest node of your wards.

The first string you come to is fraying and its light reduced. When you first integrated sea silk into your wards, you worried about it giving you away, but by now the whole empire probably knows where you live. Besides, the extra power to your wards has proven itself more than worth a little visibility.

It’s been a while since you’ve maintained your security system. Many of the threads are dull or no longer even gold. Even the base drawings are flickering out. Those, at least, you can repair immediately. 

When you first set up the wards you had to carve symbols into stone. Gl’bgolyb tried to help, but though she whispered words of power to you, you didn’t know how to write them. Back then you were still friends with him; he gave you books of magic and helped you scrape out the appropriate glyphs. Funny that once upon a time he tried to keep you safe.

You shake your head. No time to reminisce. Anyway, renewing the ward base doesn’t require any manual labor. Instead you sing the words your mom taught you and the glyphs cry out and harmonize with you. After a short song the base drawings hum with power. You can feel their electricity even from underneath the many meters of sand that have settled over the rock since you first established them. That will do for now.

Being a sea witch doesn’t mean you do magic often. It leaves you drained; your natural bioluminescence actually begins to shine because you don’t have the energy to control it right now. You can replace the lines of sea silk another time. You want to return to your shellcoon for a nap, but you’re already all dressed up so you might as well visit mom.

Mom used to say, like the sea silk draws power from the sun, so did she draw power from the deep. ”it feels like home,” she’d say. “my home is further than a star though it is very near here.” You don’t know if you’d seen a star by then. “the farthest ring is colder than the abyss, quieter than the abyss, hungrier than the abyss.” You think the abyss is cold and quiet and hungry enough already, to be honest.

It takes a long time to swim there because of your fatigue. The regularity of the movements of your arms and tail calms you. Movements of small creatures around you tire you since you like to suppress your instinct to flinch, but the closer you are to Gl’bgolyb the fewer of any life there is.

She is immense, your palace many times over. Once when you were younger you tried to swim around her, laughing. What nonsense you see it for now.

“my pink pearl,” she whispers, sounding pleased. Then, “but where has its luster gone? each drop of water sings its song to me. i know you are waning like a moon.”

Mom wants to fuss. She offers one of her finest whiskers but, it being thrice the girth of your body still, you dodge it and the probable concussion that would have followed. Instead you take out some cloth from under your shirt and start polishing her beak. She gives minimal protest today (only a “time and space will never turn their gazes on me” and a half-hearted “sea silk for this, my tiny polyp?”); you just enjoy each other’s company instead.

When you’re done rubbing blood out of the tip of her beak (you’d be at it for tides if you wanted to do her whole mouth), you put the cloth away. You swim around in mom’s beak as if you’re the baby of a parazen. It’s like being in a cave; there are jagged crags and even tunnels in the bone. You gather up rotting limbs from old feedings so you can dump them outside.

You’re too small to do the tidying you really want to, but your mom’s tentacles probably wouldn’t stand a comb anyway, tangled as they are. Plus, it’s probably part of her aesthetic.

“my friends and I have a message for you,’ Gl’bgolyb whispers when you tell her you’re going to leave her once more. You’ve not met any of her friends and you hope you never have the opportunity to. You would not be able to refuse, and void knows what would happen then.

“I would be honored to hear it, Mom,” you say. “Indeed, it is glory itself to be in the thoughts of your circle.”

Her amusement at your manners booms in your head.

“we want to tell you that someone is coming for you,” she whispers. “a relentless hunter, white of fang and black of skin. they seek my pearl and her byssus. many years ago the ocean held you both in her body. they will kneel before you. they will wear your crown.”

You don’t like to admit that you find many of your mom’s prophecies incomprehensible, but that one seemed clear enough. Well, it doesn’t matter anyway—anyone who comes for you is obviously after the sea silk. Anyone who comes for you you can hurt in return. As for wearing your crown, well, it’s not like everything she’s said has come to pass. You have enough to worry about.

“I will come back,” you promise as you do every time.

“you will never know the love I have for my little hydra,” your mom whispers.

You spend some time in melancholy contemplation with your cuttlefish back home after a very long nap. Some rest in the arrangement of cages you have for them, and others flit about the bars. Their funny flickering does not really help to dampen any of your unease.

When you were a fingerling you liked to smother your mom with questions. You’d ask about the sea, your sister, yourself. She always humored you.

“you are as the ocean,” she whispered. “your eyes might shine some, like the shallows, but your body holds its secrets in the dark.”

“Mom, what secrets have I?” you laughed.

Gl’bgolyb whispered, “the rift has some for you.”

Soon after that she taught you about byssus.

Would that she had not! Perhaps what she told you spells your end. The sea silk made your sister into an Empress. For yourself, you think it has doomed you.

A cuttlefish comes close. It puts a tentacle up your nose, and you laugh. You’ll enjoy what life you have, and defend it best you can.

You have a brief vision of someone exercising great power, and then—

The ocean trembles and cries out. For a few seconds you wonder if Gl’bgolyb has died, or grown angry despite your attentions. Then you realize there’s a gash in the water. Something has cut a path down to you. Your senses cannot make out an end to the path, and you think with the magnitude of the fissure it could easily go up to the surface.

Is this the hunter? If it is then they must not be much of one. No assassin has ever been so obvious about their approach. You’re curious now. You go to meet them.

* * *

When you reach the bottom of the dark, you see a mermaid, presumably the Witch of Life, Heiress to the Sea. Her human half emerges out of the wall of black water that’s the end of the path. She holds a double-ended trident and what looks like a metalweighted net, her arms lit with white ley lines which flare off of a truly ridiculous amount of gold. She’s kind of huge and looks much older than you. It’s hot.

“They’ve not sent a landdweller before,” the mermaid says. “Are you here for my crown?”

“They? I am but myself, and here only for my dog,” you say, echoing her formal tone. The sea witch’s brow is adorned by a circlet of gold. Gold shines on her wrists, makes her trident, and-weaves through the braids of her hair. There’s also gold amongst the fuchsia brocade of her sleeveless top. Sea silk much of that may end up being.

“What’s a dog?” she asks, tilting the top end of the trident away. You feel safer for the split second it takes you to realize this brings the bottom end closer, and that she probably knows how to switch her grip in an instant if she’s fighting with a weapon so fierce. “And what is that weapon, a gun? she says. “If you don't put that down I'll kill you, and I don't care what you want.”

So you lay it by your feet. Don't risk anything bad happening now, you tell yourself. You're doing this for Bec!

”Ugh, landdwellers are weird! Touch the water,” she commands. With some hesitation, you do—the water is nearly freezing and you flinch back.

“Thanks! That was enough for me,” she says. “Now what was the thing you were talking about?”

“Um, my dog? It’s a pet?” you say. “I don’t know if you’ve ever seen landdwelling animals—”

“They’re very cute,” she says, interrupting you, suddenly smiling. It takes years off of her face. She looks even younger than you now. “I love my cuttlefish but those things that flit about in the air look like they’re swimming too! And some of them do swim—they dive, and get pretty deep. Do you call those dogs?” You can’t stop staring at her jagged teeth. Your canines are a pale imitation of them.

“I think those are birds—I’m pretty sure you’re talking about birds. Dogs are mammals, like seals. Do seals swim this deep? Dogs can have ears like I do,” you say, moving the ones on top of your head, “and four legs with claws like mine, and tails.”

The woman stares. “Are you sure you’re not a dog?”

You stamp your foot, annoyance flaring. “I’m a human, obviously!” You just barely can keep from baring your teeth. How dumb would it be to antagonize probably the only person who can help you recover Bec? Well, your gun is still right there if things go that wrong. You reloaded it before it got too dark.

“I’ve never spoken with a human,” she says. Her voice and body language are really intense. “And I don’t think I’ve seen a dog before, so how would I know? Are you an idiot as well as a human? I thought some of them could think!”

You're sort of at a loss for words. You don’t even think she means to insult you. Her energy is—not off-putting, but—bewildering? You decide to get straight to the point.

"My dog, Bec. He's family to me! He practically raised me. I was casting a spell and it went wrong and it made him- different." You avoid saying "like you" or "like your kind" by a hair's breadth. Phew! "He won't stop killing animals, and if we were not so close I think he would kill me too. I would beg thee for a leash to tame him.”

Feferi's eyes widen. "So you just want to be safe," she says, slowly.

"Well, yes," you admit, because you aren't going to deny you've been having nightmares and waking up thinking you feel his teeth piercing your throat. "But Bec is gentle by nature. He hunted only to eat, and now he wastes so much life for no reason. And I'm afraid for other humans. If they were to come across us, he would not suffer them breathing much longer." You don't know if this would be an effective plea for a bloodthirsty seadweller, but you're trying your best!

You notice her trident is parallel to the ground now, her hold on it loose. Hopefully that’s a good sign.

"Then the dog is named Bec," she says. "What's your name, human?"

"Jade," you say. "Jade Harley."

"Ok," she says. You guess she doesn't feel like she needs to offer her own name back. "Jade, what do you want me to do?"

"I've heard tell that you are the ancient witch who reigns the bottom of the sea," you say, not knowing if flattery is what you should be going for here. Shit, is calling her ancient flattering? Too late now. "That you are the only one who knows how to weave the silk from the sea-sheep, and it has immense power for protection." You take the little piece you have out of the pocket of your coat and hold it up.

"It comes from clams, not whatever a sheep is," the mermaid answers, peering at the cloth. She uses the trident—longer than you first thought, that's terrifying—to lift it out of your hands and carry it to her own. "And the ancient witch who rules is definitely my sister, not me. This looks familiar. I think I wove like this when I was very young," she says. “It must be from my childhood. How did you get this?”

“It fell out of a book in my grandfather’s library.” You don’t remember how you got it, only that you gave it to him. You feel that wouldn’t necessarily be safe to mention. “I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t steal from you.”

She screeches with laughter. “Nobody can steal from me!” she says.

You raise your hands. “I wouldn’t for sure,” you say.

She laughs again.

“You’re so different from anyone I’ve met! A human, coming into the ocean, asking for a favor, and making jokes! I haven’t heard a joke for years—Mom’s don’t count, I don’t think she knows what humor is. That’s really exciting. Nothing exciting ever happens to me anymore.”

You don’t know what’s best to say here; this whole conversation has honestly been a struggle for you. So you just ask, “Will you help me?”

The mermaid beams. “Yes, Jade, I’ll help you! But you have to stay with me. I haven’t had a good visitor in an age, maybe ever, and how would I find a human on land? I’d have to give the thing to you after all, and I’m all fin!”

She straps her trident to her back and then lunges for you. You scream and grab your gun, but there’s no way to get an accurate shot off so close to your target, and then she’s dragging you into the water.

The next minute is probably the scariest you’ve ever experienced. When you first transformed, you didn’t fully understand what was happening. Now you are completely aware that a seadweller has you in her inescapable grip. You can’t breathe, you can’t move, you can’t tell which way is up, you can’t see partly because the water is totally dark and partly because the mermaid’s light lines are shining off of her scales and all her bling, dazzling you, and you can’t feel anything because the water is colder than snow. You feel like a toy being drowned in mountain headwaters.

Luckily you reach air before you start actually drowning. The first thing you say as you are tossed into a room of air is “No!” which was waiting to burst out of you during the whole of the horrifying little journey you just made. The second is “What the FUCK!”

“I got you through before your lungs were damaged at least,” she says as if pulling a human underwater was a reasonable action to take without warning. “You seem fine, if you can say anything.”

You pant from anger and the cold. “You can’t just kidnap me!” you yell when you catch your breath.

“That never stopped anyone from trying for me,” mutters the seadweller. What?

Lately you’ve been thinking it was a little cool that you could see in the dark because of the change. You never realized, though, that underwater would be so much blacker than night. The mermaid’s light lines are no longer glowing and you feel alone and afraid.

“We should be friends,” the mermaid says from somewhere near you. “My name is Feferi Peixes! Well, I’m Her Royal Condescension, but you can call me Feferi.”

“Ok, Feferi,” you say slowly in an attempt not to snarl, “I will freeze to death down here unless you do something about that soon. And I can’t see a thing.”

“Do all humans have such a temper? I thought that was a seadweller thing,” she says, and then starts singing.

It is a foul and harsh noise, and you grind your teeth till you realize it must be her magic. The room lights up with clusters of pearls crossing the ceiling and walls. They may be radiating heat, too; the air is warmer already.

“Is that better? I haven’t sung that one in years,” Feferi says.

She’s in a pose common in classical art of mermaids: there’s a circular pool of water in the floor which must be how you entered, and she is resting her head on her arms at the edge of it. The low pink light makes her look flushed and pretty and flints off of all the gold thread and pearls of water in her braids. Her face is very human but for the yellow of her eyes and the fangs curling over her lips.

You realize you’re staring. Now that you can see properly, you turn to observe the room instead of watching Feferi watch you. It would not be out of place in an ancient ruin on land, with its intricate decoration, but it is clearly well-maintained. You suspect the surfaces may all be grown and carved from some deep-sea species of coral. Slender columns and latticed arches make a ripple ring around the moonpool. Clinging to the walls is a layer of water about a meter and a half thick, with various small creatures swimming or scuttling around in it. There are channels radiating out from the center pool inset into the floor so that they may return to the rest of the ocean. Patterned cloth hides what you think may be passageways to other rooms. Its all very colorful and lively.

It’s become warmer than before, but you’re still cold.

“It’s better, but if you’re going to host me, you have to properly accommodate a fragile human. My clothes are soaked and I need something to keep me from freezing.”

“There’s some blankets right there! Don’t be dramatic.”

“Why does a mermaid have blankets anyway?” you grouch, going over to the heap, undressing, and using one to towel yourself dry.

Feferi says, “We used to make piles with them.” Her expression looks a little vague, as if she’s reminiscing.

“I can see that,” you say delicately. I mean, isn’t this a pile? you think.

Another dry blanket tied around your shoulders, you wring out your clothes into the moonpool as best you can. Feferi has no idea what pants are, clearly, and doesn’t seem like the kind of person you can borrow clothes from in any case.

You can’t repress your curiosity, and end up asking her why she has this room full of air instead of water.

“Oh!” She blinks. “I used to have a friend who was really into land. So we magicked this suite to have air and be warm and bright and everything.”

You shake out your coat. “Used to? What happened to him?”

Feferi laughs. There is a weird sharpness to it. She says, “I don’t care what happened to him.” You feel awkward for bringing it up, but Feferi doesn’t seem to notice your discomfort. “I never got rid of them because I needed somewhere to store deadwater to rinse the sea silk in and it can only be spun in air.”

“Oh!” you say. “That’s really interesting. Does deadwater mean freshwater?”

“Ugh, it isn’t fresh at all! I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Feferi makes a face.

“Oh yeah, I guess you’d have to be breathing it,” you say. “So you’ve swum upriver?”

She nods. “Sea lions like to go through to the delta for fun, on dares. I tried to follow them once but I got really bloated and I couldn’t sense anything properly so I came back instead.”

This is fascinating. You’d never imagine you’d get a coherent interview concerning the physiology of another species! It’s a good opportunity to learn what you can. So you ask, “What do you mean by sense?”

Plus, Feferi doesn’t seem put off at all by the questions. “I can sense movements in the water with my tail. Do humans have spatial sense?”

“No, not like that,” you say, leaning towards her. “So is that like the lateral line that fish have? Oh! That must be why you sensed the tunnel that I shot through the ocean.”

“You’re an idiot,” Feferi laughs. She seems kind of giggly in general. “That’d be like saying your fingerprints are why you sense an earthquake! By the way, I have fingerprints. You seem pretty curious about me,” she says, and winks.

You lean back and look away, embarrassed.

“Is that how you came down here? You used your weapon?” Feferi asks.

Automatically you put a hand out to grab the rifle, but it’s not within your reach. You hear Feferi snort and, when you look at her, see that she’s taken it in hand, though she isn’t pointing it at you. “I’ve seen something like this,” she says. “This seems very primitive in comparison, though.”

“Um, thanks,” you say, sarcastic. Feferi just smiles at you, and you’re kind of mad at how well it works on you. “I’m a witch; I modified a spell for breathing underwater and then applied it to the bullet I used to shoot.”

“Oh, I’m a witch too!” Feferi says.

“Obviously; I came here because I knew you were a witch,” you say before you can stop yourself.

“Pretty cocky for a human trapped in a sea-witch’s lair,” she says.

You freeze. Feferi laughs.

“Come on, dummy. I’ll show you my workroom!”

She uses her hands to drag herself through one of the hanging cloths. Her movements are more adroit than you expected, and you remind yourself to be cautious as you follow her.

It’s another room much like the main one, with meticulously carved walls behind vertical water and delicate columns and arches in front of it. There are many handsome ceramic bowls scattered about the tiled floor, some of them containing brown fibers and some inhabited by little animals like sea stars and cuttlefish.

“You’re not supposed to be in the bowls, that’s for the silk,” says Feferi, tipping them into the shallow channels of water in the floor. You suppose those plain looking fibers are sea silk, then? You thought it was supposed to all be gold.

“What are all these animals doing here? I didn’t know there would be so much life at the bottom of the ocean,” you say. You thought of it as a void, like the space between stars. The animals all seem very friendly; some crabs are scuttling across your feet, and the cuttlefish that Feferi just scolded are slyly pulling their way back into the empty bowls.

“I take care of them!” Feferi chirps, herding the cuttlefish about. “They come to my palace and I feed them and fix some of their problems and keep them safe. And of course there’s life down here—just because land is so crowded doesn’t mean we’re dead in the water. We even have mammals, like you. The deep whales fight all the time with the colossal squid.”

“Colossal squid?” you say, blanching.

“They often lose against a whale, because they’re soft,” Feferi says. “They have eyes this big,” she holds her hands about the width of your waist, “to try and see them before the whale can sound them out. It’s weird, taking care of animals that all eat each other. I’ve woven skin grafts for the scars the whales get, and loops to help the squid move more quickly. I know I don’t help that much, or like, at all, but it’s a habit from childhood, I guess.”

“It’s a sweet notion,” you say. Despite her massive trident and sharp-toothed smile, Feferi seems a gentle person.

Feferi finishes evacuating all the cuttlefish and picks up some of the sea silk. “You want to watch me make the collar? It will take some time, of course. I can’t do it in one go.”

She invites you to sit by her as she begins spinning thread. “You can know all my secrets, little human,” she says, patting your knee. You can see why the title for mermaid royalty is Condescension. “Well, it’s not like you could do anything with them. I’m pretty sure only a mermaid can.”

She talks all about the sea silk freely. It has to be from a certain species of clam, living only in a few coves in shallow water. Harvest must be with a knife with specific charms, made from bone chipped off of some creature’s beak. The threads take hours to untangle. They must be washed several times each in salt and fresh water and can only be spun and woven in air. Finally, completed works must be exposed to the sun to reveal their golden color and gain their true power.

“Mom- that is, Gl’bgolyb,” Feferi says, clarifying nothing, “always told me how I was glorifying the clams by using their simple excretions for such noble purpose. War, and conquest, and sport.” She makes a face at a cuttlefish swimming by and then extends her finger into the water. The cuttlefish curls a tentacle around her finger, making her look like a songbird caller on dry land. “But I think it’d be better if I could make things for creation, and protecting, and healing.”

“Are no seadwellers like you? Wanting to heal?”

Feferi howls, and at first you think she’s angry and wince, but you figure out that she’s just laughing.

“I mean, I know they kill humans a lot, when they can. It’s just that you seem kind,” you offer.

Feferi is still giggling. “Thanks!” She grows contemplative. “I don’t know that much about other seadwellers, to be honest. I’m really isolated here, and I haven’t had a friend since—for a long time. But I’ve attended court. It’s...decidedly not kind. I don’t think it’s possible that we’re all, well, killers, and war-makers. But I don’t know. Maybe we are.” 

She seems saddened, and you try to change the subject.

“So the sun—the material needs exposure to the light to activate all its inherent properties,” you say. “Does it need to incubate at all? How does the passage of time influence its magic?” You can’t help but sound academic. You blame your Grandpa’s influence.

“Time doesn’t have much effect on things centered in the ocean, I think? I mean, what even is time? Everything grows slowly or not at all, it’s always cold, there’s little light. I sleep when I’m tired and wake when I’m rested. Thats all,” Feferi says.

It turns out this means you are awake and alone a lot, because Feferi is tired all the time for some reason, and, understandably, does not seem to trust you enough to sleep in the same room as you. She retreats to her rooms underwater and leaves you wondering and idle in the dim air. You’ve given up on maintaining any circadian rhythm.

Luckily you have a nose. You’re also, coincidentally, hella nosy.

The suite of magicked-air rooms is extensive. It all smells like salt, and there is that bright lemon smell of the sea silk in the room Feferi seems to work in the most. There are also rooms where the pearls are brighter and the air warmer, and there are planters of flowers you recognize from sandy dunes such as sea fiddleneck and sand verbena and salt grass. But there are some rooms with air that smells stale, and there are brown waterlines on the walls, and shed scales that are brittle with age. You wonder about the—friend?—Feferi has mentioned. Her tail is fuchsia. The shed here is violet.

You entertain yourself by trying to decipher what must be books of magic written by seadwellers, taking notes on the sea creatures that venture near you, and eating fish and seedcakes. You take oil from Feferi’s stores and rub it into your bag and coat, knowing you’ll have to leave the same way you came. Bec dogs your thoughts, and your claws still disturb you every now and then, but you feel at ease for the most part. It helps to have someone to talk to that can talk back. You think Feferi feels the same; often when she comes into the air, she’s still chattering to a squid or something. She’s probably led a very lonely life.

And you like Feferi! She’s helping you without even ensuring you’ll give her anything in return—which you’d like to rectify, but all your magic is really weak underwater, and while you didn’t bring anything of material value you’re pretty sure it wouldn’t matter because Feferi is clearly rich as fuck.

She’s also cute and cheerful and creative. You’re watching her further braid the thin thin threads for strength. She’s talking extensively, as usual.

“When I was little I didn’t really know what was going on. People would come and have me make relics to make their swords sing for more blood, or their shields bear more weight. I made shirts that would break any metal trying to pierce through their weave—that’s what I’m wearing.” She pulls at her shirt with its whorls in gold. “Then I got older, and was formally titled and introduced at my sister’s court, and I learned about all the battles waged with my work. I’m sure there were incursions onto land, too. It’s all really sad.”

You tentatively put a hand on Feferi’s arm. She flinches, and you nearly draw back, except she puts her hand over yours, and smiles.

“Thanks. So anyway, I decided to grow up, and I decided I got to say what that meant. Mom spoke to the rift on my behalf and got the palace moved for me, so I could isolate myself, and be closer to her for her psychic protection.” You sort of don’t ever understand what she says about her mom. “Now I only cultivate the sea silk for myself, for art, and I bless animals with it. Making this,” she indicates the threads in her hand, “I think that it’s a chance to help people—whoever, whatever your animal would decide to kill. It could be you one day, and I’ve decided I like you so I don’t want that to happen! You seem like a nice person. You’re the first to ask me for something to protect- like, really protect, not just keep safe their body for war-making.”

“I’m glad you don’t want me to be killed,” you say.

“It’s only fair,” she says. “I don’t want to be killed, after all.” You don’t know how likely it is that Feferi would be killed.

You soon find out.

Feferi is snuggled in the pile of blankets in the entry room, tying off the ends of the leash. It looks like an unassuming flat rope. “You’ll have to get it out under the sun before it can do anything to your dog,” she says, reaching for you and winding it around your arm. You know you must thank her, but her touch has you dizzy.

”Someone’s here,” Feferi says suddenly, jerking away from you. She seizes her trident and drags herself to the room’s opening to the rest of her palace. She sets part of her fish tail into the glossy dark, closing her eyes. “Fuck, they made it past my wards. Shit.” She yanks her tail back up in order to close the opening with some sort of metal trapdoor that slides out from under the tiling. “There’s no time to take you to the path back to land. You have to hide somewhere. One of the other rooms. They’ll probably make it in here, and I’ve only ever fought to protect myself, not two people.”

“No,” you say, and reach for your gun.

“That won’t do anything,” Feferi hisses.

You raise it, and point it at the door. “I can help,” you insist.

She holds your gaze for what feels like an unsettling eternity before she nods. Of course, that’s exactly when the invader fucking shatters through the metal of the door and it goes flying towards you. You just barely dodge being crushed by it, but it rips the gun out of your hands, and your yell catches the attention of the intruder, who is twice Feferi’s size and therefore having trouble coming up through the moonpool. 

“The Heiress keeps a human?” they say, sounding on the verge of laughter. “Some say she likes odd little pets. Seals and squids. A sprout from land.” Their teeth spiral outwards from their mouth like boar tusks. You start drawing out a spell for a shield but the liens sputter and fade with a buzz. “And a magic-user!” the mermaid says, finally coming wholly into the room. “It’ll flavor your flesh so deliciously.”

They turn towards you. They’re standing quite easily with their tail curled underneath them. You don’t think they’re armed until you see that their purple gloves are heavily spiked with metal. You feel so small and stupid, thinking you could have done anything, now weaponless and with no magic against this foe.

He lunges for you. You’re paralyzed by a flash of Feferi doing the same thing when you first met. But she’d never hurt you, now—not it matters, now. You briefly resign yourself to your death. 

But as he grabs your throat and plunges you into the ring of water to pin you against the wall, the instinct to live boils up in your gut. You fight. You howl, bubbles obscuring your vision, try to claw him, kick out as hard as you can. You don’t think this actually does anything. You’re running out of breath. You feel like your neck might pop.

You think they collapse onto you. There’s a great pressure on your body, crushing you. You try to push him off of you but there’s no way you can manage the weight. After a few moments, though, it lessens. The water around you is growing opaque. Is this death, coming to ease your fear? You think of Bec, and Grandpa.

It’s actually Feferi pulling the—body—off of you. She first hauls you out of the water and makes sure you’re breathing, then uses her tail to slide the seadweller off of her trident. “I had to use a different angle than usual, I didn’t want to skewer you too. Sorry I took so long,” she says, sounding casual. "Sometimes I freeze up."

You catch your breath. Your eyes can’t help but dart to and from her face, the body, the blood diffusing in the wall of water. Feferi is using the prongs of her trident to trace the embroidery of their shirt, and then to flip the corpse over so she can crouch and stare at the face. “One of my sister’s court, I think. They’ve probably fallen from favor if they came to assassinate me, most of them have. The stitching’s her work, at least. Good thing the magic’s faded from it because I’m not sure if even my trident would have worked otherwise.” Then she looks up at you. “Jade, are you okay?” she asks. “Did they hurt you very badly? Your throat’s bruised. I have salve for that—”

“You killed them!” you say, hoarse, a dog’s whine in the cave of your chest.

Feferi blinks and looks down at the body. “What else was I supposed to do? They were going to kill you. I mean, obviously they came here for me, but you were right there.”

You stagger and fall to your hands and knees, then throw up. Feferi says “oh” very quietly, and then, “I’ll get you some water.”

You want to wipe the tears gumming up your eyes and there’s probably blood in your hair and when you think about that you retch again and it splatters all over the backs of your hands. You stay like that, on all fours, crying and dry heaving, until Feferi comes back with a bowl of water, a rag, and a little pot. As you sit up and gulp down the water, she uses the rag to carefully wipe your face, then hold one hand tenderly to clean it, then the other. With three fingers she presses your forehead until you tilt your head back and bare your neck. With one finger she takes a semisolid from the pot and touches it to your throat. With slow little motions, she dabs at all your bruises until they’re all covered with the salve. Her fingertips are so cold.

“I’m sorry,” she says, finished. This is the most subdued you’ve ever heard her sound. Your heart skips for some reason.

“No, I,” you say, trying not to hyperventilate. She rubs your back with broad, heavy strokes of her hand. “You saved my life.”

“I’m sorry,” she says again, sighing. That doesn’t make sense. Your chest is tight.

“For what?” you ask.

“I had to make it up to you,” she says, looking at your face, looking worried.

You feel scared. “Make what up?”

Feferi bites her lip, draws back from you. “I killed your grandpa.”

“No,” you say immediately.

“One of my harvest times,” she says, ignoring you, making relentless eye contact, “I met you. I was trying to figure out why you were so familiar. I couldn’t remember til now. We were so small back then. The ends of the waves had me by the hands and you by the feet. There was a piece of sea silk I wanted to sun, and I hadn’t noticed you. I’d never seen a human before. You didn’t have a tail but I saw your hair was like mine.”

“Stop,” you say. You can barely hear what she’s saying. Your watch your hands shaking. There’s no feeling in them.

“Your grandpa called for you and I got scared and swam away. A while later I realized I’d dropped my weaving. Maybe it was days for you on land, I don’t know. I came back to my clam beds to look for it and he was there on shore and I was scared. He tried to ask me about the sea silk. I thought he was going to kill me for it like everyone does, so I killed him.”

“I think I found that. The cloth.” Your heart is racing. Wouldn’t you remember meeting a mermaid? You can barely recall anything from around when Grandpa disappeared. Except now you know he died. Was killed. “But I didn’t find his body,” you say.

“That’s probably because I took it,” Feferi says. “I fed him to my mom.”

“What—Feferi—” you stammer.

“My mom. Gl’bgolyb. She’s the Emissary of the Horrorterrors, the Rift’s Carbuncle, Speaker of the Vast Glub. She could kill every seadweller but me and my sister in an instant. I have to help keep her fed and happy.” Her face is blank. “She’s a burden, true, but I love her and I wouldn’t have it any other way because this is why I am here.”

“A carbuncle—that’s an infection,” you say, your revulsion active in almost every nerve of your body. “You treat an infection.”

Feferi suddenly starts shouting. “I am not going to kill my own guardian because I killed yours when I was a kid. I didn’t know! And I don’t even kill humans anymore! I am not going to kill my MOM, whom I LOVE, and risk losing every seadweller in the ocean! If I prevented genocide of humans, who are also capable of evil, I am not going to let that happen to us either!”

You feel hollow. “Human genocide?”

“I am not going to talk about that. I am going to feed this person to my mom, who I’ve told you about. I’ll get an animal to take you to your stupid path up to land.” She slips into the water, dragging the corpse with her.

You try to get your breathing under control. That’s the most important thing right now, just finding air, slowing your heart, which trying to hammer its way out of your ribcage. Eventually all your autonomous bodily functions calm down. You’re not sure if YOU’RE calm, but it’s good enough.

There’s purple blood everywhere. Pulling your grandpa’s gun from where it’s lying is tough because of both your shock and that the metal door landed on top of it. The barrel is damaged; you don’t know if you can fix it without a gunsmith looking at it. You don’t know if you can let a human see you again even after taming Bec. Feferi didn’t mind your ears or teeth, but she’s a monster too.

As you ready yourself to leave, tying your gun to your pack and shrugging on your coat, something splashes into the room from the moonpool. You start and draw your knife on it only to find it’s a seal, huffing and eyeing you. It waits patiently for you to flap the anxiety out of your hands, tucking its head into the rest of its body.

You put your feet into the water to let it know you’re ready. It slips back into the water, and you wrap your arms around it, holding your breath.

The water is dark and cold and empty.

It spits you and the seal out onto the path you shot. You lie there for a while, gasping. After some time you pick yourself up and start walking. Looking back, you see the seal watching you leave. You wave to it but it ignores you.

You head upwards. You’re trying to walk mindfully instead of thinking about all the shit Feferi just dropped on you, and the seadweller that actually dropped on you. Though you don’t really realize, you’re unwinding and rewinding the sea silk around your arm. Where Feferi’s touch was tender yours is tense. You feel a little better once you see some sunlight.

You don’t know why you feel so broken. You knew your grandpa was probably dead—even if he wasn’t killed he’d be dead by now anyway. He was old.

You walk for some time. Because of the slope, you have to sit and rest many times.

You ascend.

* * *

It turns out some vestige of Bec remained so loyal that the monster waited for you on the shore. That, or your tether from the accident still remains active. He sits and stares at you, you with the leash in your hand.

You raise it up. The first full rays of the sun catch it and you hear magic sing as the brown of the fibers turns to a rich gold before your eyes. Bec begins to tremble. You keep walking towards him with the leash held out, and you think you might be able to just throw it over his head, but when you get close enough he leaps up, howling, and turns, sand flying in all directions, and runs away just as you reach the beach and the ocean path closes behind you with a roar like a thunderclap.

Fuck.

You lack the strength to chase him right now—you’re sapped from the terror of the assassination attempt and everything Feferi told you about, and besides, it was also a long walk back to dry land. You manage to trudge back to the castle and collapse after you pull the gates shut. You lie down there right on the cliff stone hot from the day and immediately fall asleep.

When you wake it is night. The air is warm; the breeze is cool. The leash you hold is somehow still as radiant as it was this afternoon.

You end up wandering the sage scrub and woodland above the beach. The moon is only a sliver of teeth but compared to the ocean bottom all the shrubs look bright and cheerful in the silver light. You think about Feferi, attacked by fear from all ten sides. Her horrorterror mom.

Your contemplation runs so deep that you don’t really realize you’ve stumbled upon Bec, sleeping in a hollow in the chaparral, until you nearly step on him. As you become conscious of this you have the misfortune to break a brittle branch of buckwheat. He wakes immediately, looks at you, and bolts.

Yelling, you charge after him. With a flying leap you wrestle him to the ground. The two of you snap at each other, kicking and snarling. You whip the leash outwards and manage to tie it around his neck. He stills and quiets. You stand up and watch him breathe heavily in the dark.

He barks, looks at you, and then jumps. Your heart rockets into your throat and you try to fend him off, but all he does after knocking you over is lick your face and whine happily. You laugh and hug him. After some snuggling he flips over. He begs for belly rubs. You oblige, noticing that the leash has seemingly disappeared. When the two of you finally get up to head home, you see a line of gold powder in the dirt beneath the sage that Bec promptly scatters in his attempt to dance in circles around you.

It turns out fixing the malignant part of your magic did nothing to revert Bec to his previous size and he’s just huge now. You don’t mind this too much. The only real consequences are that he can bully you into going where he wants when you’re out collecting food, and that you can’t reach your arms around his middle anymore. You still try your best!

Around your plans for cultivating a garden on the cliff and making nets because you’re tired of catching fish by line, your thoughts can’t help but drift to Feferi. You find that over the past few days you’ve forgiven her for killing Grandpa, though you’re still grieving him. If she, as a child, felt the need to do that—well, she didn’t get to be much of a child, then. You didn’t either.

When you’re repairing an old net of your Grandpa’s you found in a storage room (thank your lucky star, you don’t have the stamina to make one from scratch right now) you are struck by an idea. It’s because you’re breathing spells over the knots and loops of the twine, flush with power now that you’re not surrounded by saltwater. You could invent a spell to help Feferi, apply it on land, and so ease her burden. It’s such a great idea you leap up and trip immediately because your legs were tangled in the net. Bec stretches his mouth open to laugh at you. You swat his ears and he prances away.

As you did when you were trying to figure out how to help Bec so you do now that you want to help Feferi: you ransack the library. This time there is not helpful scrap of sea silk to guide your search. You spend long hours in the shade of live oaks flipping through dusty tomes, parsing the curious flourishes of language they employ, sketching out diagrams in the dirt.

You feel silly when you finally find something promising. It’s in a book of warding magic; you’ve been respelling the words in the castle’s wards every evening and bolstering their repellent qualities with bundles of herbs every morning. You could have realized so much earlier! Still, you’ve found a spell that can help. Now you have to find Feferi.

She’d talked about the shallows where the clams grow. You’re pretty sure they’re close to these cliffs, otherwise you wouldn’t have seen her. You weren’t allowed to stray far. Not that you always did what your grandpa said, but you tried to abide by the rules when you could.

You approximate a map of the surrounding coast and walk the beaches. You mark off the ones that aren’t rocky, and where the cliffs jut directly into deep water. You note the remaining spots and start diving. Compared to the last time you were in the water, the dives are pleasant and warm. You come across crevices and caves, but none with the long shells she described.

“Bec, I think my luck’s been pretty bad lately!” you tell him, walking down from the castle. He doesn’t always follow you; you know he has his own dog things to be doing. This time, though, he trots out in front and you step close behind. He takes you to a little cove you overlooked then collapses on the sand, tongue out.

“If you say so,” you say, and dive. Almost immediately you see the huge clams, some of them more than half your height in length, sticking narrow and straight out of the sandy bottom. You swim back up to to the surface and shout “Good dog, Bec!” and he leaps up and barks, then plunges into the sea for you. You spend the afternoon wrestling with him on the beach and sleep well at night.

You bring your net and the book of wards down to the cove the next morning. You can sleep right on the sand, and fish and make fires here, as long as it takes for Feferi to come harvest the sea silk again. You absolutely do not want to miss her.

You’re lucky: Feferi arrives within a few hours. When she comes in range, you throw the net and then haul it with all your might. Entangled in the knots, she makes eye contact with you and starts screaming.

"So you're just going to come kill me for my clams like EVERYONE ELSE!" Feferi shrieks. Her angry twists are accompanied by both frothing splashes and frighteningly efficient scythes of her trident that free her much quicker than you ever could have guessed.

"No, you idiot!" you scream back, running towards the cove walls before Feferi can murder you, not knowing she could just throw the trident if she really wanted. "I needed to tell you I found a spell that can protect you from the people who DO want to kill you! Then you don’t have to murder anyone!"

Feferi bares her fangs. They peel bright like a mangosteen's innards against her black lips.

"I mean it!" You go and retrieve the tome from behind the rock where you put it. You flip through the pages and hold the relevant passages up for Feferi's inspection, who merely says, "I can't read filthy human languages."

"Rude, Feferi!"

“I’m not sorry for defending myself,” she says, snapping apart the last strands of the net with her bare hands. “And I have to feed Gl’bgolyb somehow.”

You sigh. “I know. Honestly that’s probably the best case scenario. But, I’m really serious when I say I have a way to help protect you.”

She looks skeptical.

“If you want, you can think of it like a trade for the leash you made. I didn’t, uh, end up thanking you,” you say.

“Yeah you ran away like a human- oh, wait,” Feferi says, and then laughs way too loud.

“I’m happy you can joke about all that,” you say dubiously.

She winces and says, “Sorry. I didn’t mean to be insensitive. I know you were really upset.”

“I’m not as habituated to attempts on my life as you are,” you say, trying to joke but not quite managing it.

“People try to kill me all the time, since I was a fry,” she says. “Okay, sometimes they only want to kidnap me or steal the sea silk or make frightening demonic bargains with Mom. But still, it happens a lot! It’s not a big deal.”

“It’s a big deal to me!” you say, not meaning to sound as fierce as you do, which startles Feferi. “You don’t HAVE to be scared all the time. I can help you like you helped me,” you say. You tried to reign in your emotions at least a little bit but you’re pretty sure you didn’t succeed.

“Stay with me and you can work on it too. It’ll go faster with the two of us getting the supplies,” you say. “Then, I also need things like your hair and consent to add to the formula at specific times.”

“You may have an eyelash, if you really need it,” Feferi says. You think she probably feels very generous with that statement.

“You know I’m doing this for you, right?” you ask, skeptical.

“And I’m so grateful!” she laughs. She aims a little eyelash flutter your way. You blush even though you think she doesn’t really believe you can help her.

“But seriously,” she says, “you could have just tapped me on the shoulder or something. A net is MY thing.”

You roll your eyes. “Sure, if I wanted to be skewered on your trident. Which I don’t!”

Feferi considers this. “Yeah, I can see that. I gotta watch my back! I’m not just anybody.”

“I’m gonna watch your back,” you promise.

She narrows her eyes at you. It only bolsters your resolve.

“Well,” she says, relenting, “please say you at least have a way for me to get around on land. Fancy witchery, mage tricks.”

Luckily Bec decides to come say hi. You get an idea.

“This isn’t as bad as I thought,” Feferi says, perched atop your dog as you pull open the gates to the castle. “And no enemy of mine will think to look for me here.”

She has a lot of opinions about your home. “It’s artless,” she says, scrunching her face. “And stone may be heavy but it cracks in an instant under the proper weapon. Well, if you were armed by me or my sister, anyway.” Feferi looks at your grandpa’s bed and shakes her head. “I can’t imagine sleeping on something like that,” she says. She approves of the library, at least. “Nice and light. I’m sure you while away many an hour here. But where are your rooms?”

You freeze as you put the ward book down. “These are my rooms?” you try.

“You said that was your grandpa’s bed, not your bed,” she presses back. “I want to see where you slept!”

So you lead Bec to bring Feferi up the curling stairs of your tower.

When you step up into your room you’re surprised by how plain it is. In your memory it’s bursting with scent and color; now you find sunlight falling on mostly grey stone and brown plants long dead. All the pots and planters are still there, as are your knitted toys scattered over the floor. You can’t remember if grandpa made those for you or bought them from some town. Feferi and Bec tumble onto the bed, which collapses under their weight. As Feferi laughs and Bec grins, you open the wardrobe in the corner. Your clothes are folded and neat. You pick up a shirt. You were so small.

You sit next to the ruin of the bed and start crying. Feferi straightens and, with some hesitation, pats your shoulder. You cry harder.

“I’m not mad at you,” you say after a while, breathing deeply. Bec has snuggled up against your back; you lean on him gratefully. “I know you felt like you had to kill him. You were scared, and he was old. I just miss him. I wish I had more time with him. I wish he’d taken better care of me.”

Feferi says nothing, but does not look away.

You wipe your face with the bottom of your shirt. “I’m okay now,” you say. “I think it was good to come up here.”

“I’m right a surprising amount of the time,” Feferi says, and you bark with laughter. “Full of it!” you say, and she shrugs. “I guess you’re ooonly the high and mighty princess of the sea,” you tease.

“Heiress,” she says, sticking her nose up. You laugh harder.

You return to the library to look at the book you found in the proper setting. 

You thought, underwater with her, that Feferi was an incredible witch. To be guardian of sea silk! The meticulous process of making the leash lent her an aura of godliness to you. How her hands would turn over and over, the dimple in her wrist winking at you watching. Purely scientific interest, of course!

But it turns out that Feferi actually doesn’t even CARE about magic!

“Gl’bgolyb taught me how to do the sea silk...I don’t know. The other stuff is just to make things convenient,” she says. “And all the cool magic you do doesn’t really work if you initiate it underwater! Of course I will always respect Mother’s prophecies, even if they can be very wrong—” and here she gives you a strange, considering look—“but I don’t feel the need for any grandeur or cleverness or things like that.”

“Lazy,” you say, out of amazement. When you were with her in the ocean you wouldn’t have wanted to say something like that out of fear, though you’d definitely blurt it out anyways. Now you don’t want to say it in case you hurt her feelings.

She’s fine with it, luckily. “We’re not all inventive geniuses like Jade the Witch from the Cliffs, Under Whose Command the Ocean Retreats,” she says, rolling her eyes, but smiling.

You laugh. “What’s with the weird title?”

“I’m royalty, dummy!” she says.

“I know, idiot,” you say.

So you review the spell formula in the book yourself. As you write down a modified list of ingredients you think will work Feferi shows more interest.

“Those must all be plants, right? I like things that grow,” she explains. “It’s because the air is so bright on land. There’s so many plants; we just have seaweeds. You have trees and flowers and they’re all so beautiful! Not that the ocean isn’t lovely. But her beauty is elegant, you know? Kind of restrained. Land just bursts with all it can! It’s so exciting!”

The yellow of her eyes look gold with how much they shine.

You end up establishing a routine. Feferi adjusts very quickly to sunlight and wakes up earlier than you would ever want to. Your morning starts when she and Bec, both dripping, wander into Grandpa’s bedroom and start flicking droplets of water at you. You eat while Feferi plays with Bec. Feferi confirms that she does not eat very often because of her species slow rate of growth, which you suspected when you visited her. You never saw her put anything in her mouth during that period.

Then you pack your bag with your knife, twine, your various jars and tins, and head upland.

There are certain plants you know grant a quieter footstep and a softer voice when you’re being pursued by enemies. Others you gather for their amplification potential, and still others just because you don’t want to waste your edible flour on thickening a potion. Of course, there’s the plants the book mandated as well, the typical ingredients for protection used to establish shields.

You draw leaves and flower parts so Feferi can help you identify healthy specimens. It’s convenient because on Bec’s back she can cover more ground than you. When she tears up bunches of whole plants you facepalm and explain the methods for sustainable harvest. It’s weird, passing on land knowledge to a seadweller, but Grandpa and the village elders who taught you probably would approve.

You know you ought to be serious, gathering ingredients for the spell, but it turns out to be great fun meandering the coastal forests and sage scrub with Feferi and Bec. She berates him constantly as he frolics this way and that. Though she is at his whim, the lectures are joking, and you find it rather sweet how she has taken to your old companion. When you rest among redwood roots or inflorescences of chemise, she absently scritches his chin even as she complains loudly about his drooling.

Feferi marvels at everything she sees on land. “It’s the hairs that get me,” she says, for example, licking delicately at the barbs of the fruit of a hedge parsley. You can’t understand how she does it; the hairs stay in your skin and hurt for days. “On your plants and your animals both! The only thing with hair in the ocean are my kind, which is one of the ways you know that we’re the best.”

Sometimes when she passes near, you think she has to resist the temptation to touch your hair. You later find she’s been plaiting sections of Bec’s tail. You’re not sure whether to be grateful or not you’ve dodged her hands.

You put Feferi’s hands to good use grinding up peeled rhizomes and oily seeds in your mortar while you pick staminodes out from penstemon flowers. You add ingredients in careful stirs to your cauldron as you heat it up every morning before you go out. Feferi comments on the stink and you roll your eyes.

Summer reigns. Her rule is that of such iron even the coast is an oven. Bec pants loudly under the sun and Feferi, used to abyssal cold, forgoes her heavy embroidered top. You’re surprised to find that, underneath it, she wears not only a fine shirt of sea silk, but also a cuirass and backplate. 

“Can you help me take it off? I do it myself every time and I’m sick of it! And you say you’re helping me, so help me now,” she orders. There are a lot of buckles which trouble your claws. When you finally heave the plate off of her, she immediately sheds the sea silk, and lays her body bare to you.

You’d be a little shocked at the impropriety if you hadn’t remembered you did the same in her home, and instead you're shocked at all the scars that crisscross her torso.

Feferi shoots a glance at your gaping mouth and guesses the source of your distraction. “Did you think I was kidding about all the assassination attempts?” she says, her voice light.

“I believed you,” you say truthfully. “I just didn’t imagine the evidence to be...like this, I guess.”

She traces a couple of the scars, bright on her grey skin, with her hands.

“They’re all pretty old. It hasn’t come that close for a long time now. But that’s why I always have to be ready. If your spell works, then, well.”

You help her bandage her torso so her gills don’t get dust and pollen in them. She rightly slaps your hands away when they linger, keen to investigate, over her gillslits.

“Court a gill first, why don’t you!” she says. You’re pretty sure that none of that sentence, including the pun, is a joke.

You long to bare your skin too. Unfortunately you need to abide by your health and wear proper protective gear. Feferi’s skin seems to be much thicker than yours, which explains how she barrels through nettles taller than her without registering their existence. She pulls out taproots with her claws faster than you ever could with gloves and your serrate blade.

“You’ve got claws too! I don’t understand why you need to muck about with that little toy,” Feferi says.

“This would be perfectly adequate for defending myself, if it came to it,” you answer, a little embarrassed.

Feferi pretends to look over her shoulder. Her trident, still strapped to her back, shines pointedly.

“Ugh. My skin is thin, ok? My hands get all torn up when I try to use my claws. Are you happy I admitted I’m a soft awful weakling human?”

Her earfins twitch. “I don’t think you’re a soft awful weakling human.”

Your face feels hot. “Really?”

“Really really.” She smiles.

“Thanks, I guess?”

The two of you talk some about her Empire. “I want to make it better,” she says simply. “There’s little material need for seadwellers to war so much. We could easily care for each other instead. And humans,” she looks at you, “we could be friends with humans. It doesn’t have to be like it is now. If I overthrow my sister, or won my way into her court, I think I could change it.”

You want to help her so badly.

One day, surrounded by pines and the fragrance of ceanothus, you ask Feferi for her trident.

“So you’ve decided you want to know what it feels to wield power?” she says, taking it in hand and aiming it at you. Bec growls. “I was kidding, pup,” she tells him, lowering it. Bec licks her arm and she giggles.

“We’re near a node of magic,” you explain. “It’s the last thing we need for the formula.” Feferi graciously gave you TWO eyelashes, one from each side, to put into the potion the day before. “I mean, obviously we can’t take the node itself! But we can take a little soil from the spot where the currents of power intersect, and it’ll have the right properties.”

“What do you need for my trident for?” Feferi asks. “Are you going to dowse?” She says it with great fascination.

“Uh, yes, I’d like to use it to dowse for the point,” you say. You don’t know how a mermaid knows about dowsing, which is normally a water-finding thing.

Feferi points her trident at a random tree. “Why couldn’t I do it?” she says.

You groan. “Have you searched for a node on land before?”

“No,” she admits, and then laughs. She hands you the trident. You stagger with its weight and she laughs again. As much as you like its sound, you feel a little embarrassed at that last one. There’s no way you can hold this with one arm like you used to do with your broom in the mountains.

“How about this, Jade,” Feferi says. “You can have your hand on the trident and I’ll help you hold it up!”

So you end up with your hand on the trident and Feferi’s hand on yours exerting her incredible strength. You stammer out the incantation and the two of you turn to the trident’s gentle pull.

“It’s in that direction, then? Do you know how far out?” Feferi asks, chest against your shoulders.

“Not exactly,” you say, disengaging from her as fast as you can. Your face feels hot. “But it’s close, and I think the trident should indicate when we’re on top of it.”

You whistle for Bec. He comes trotting out of some shrubs with dirt all over his face and some leaves in his ears. Feferi picks them out before she climbs on top of him. He meanders according to your direction, and Feferi holds out the trident in front of her. In several hundred meters it begins to hum.

“This must be it, then,” she says. “What do we do, just take a little dirt?”

“You ask for some soil,” you tell her, and then do so. Spirits of many kinds keep a careful watch over strong nodes, and you just have to hope your reasoning is good enough for them. You plea for Feferi’s life in your head, and then draw your knife.

Digging it into the ground, you feel no resistance, though it is hard under your shoes and this hillside faces south. You’re relieved, and put the little scoop of soil into a jar to bring home.

Feferi watches intently as you tap it into your cauldron. There’s a puff of smoke. The resulting liquid is uniform and thick. Magic—you wish cooking were so easy. “Is that it, then?”

“Well, we could apply the spell now,” you say reluctantly. “But I think it’ll be better if we wait.”

If you’re being honest with yourself, which, to be totally honest with yourself, you struggle with, you know the spell could be applied immediately with no ill effects. Well, an ill effect could be assassination, you reason, since inadequate protection could make Feferi’s defenses worse instead of better. What if she dropped her guard and your enchantment didn’t work? You suppose you’d never find out. Thinking about that too much makes you queasy.

Anyway, you’re no second rate witch. The two of you will wait the full tilt of a moon and the magic will be sturdy. You can’t settle for less!

Feferi offers almost no resistance when you suggest she keep around the castle in the meantime. This surprises you some. You’d figure she’d want to go back to her palace.

“I’ll admit, I am missing it,” she tells you, cracking mussels open and eating them raw. You’re sitting at the base of the castle cliff in some tide pools. Your attention is split between catching hermit crabs for fun and watching Feferi’s hands. “And maybe the squid and cuttlefish will wonder some where I am, and the seals and whales think I am neglecting them. But they can take care of themselves well enough. The reason I came up in the first place is because I used the last of my prepared sea silk making your leash for Bec, so there’s nothing I need to guard at home right now either.”

Bec is currently sticking his face in a little blowhole in the rocks. He barks wildly every time the water surprises him, which is every time a wave comes in. You are terribly fond of him.

The incubation time for the spell is one of the happiest of your life. You and Feferi swim in the shallows a lot, trying to escape the heat. She indulges you and plays catch me and find me even though your swimming is nothing to hers. Sometimes she rushes out a little deeper to play with passing dolphins, shrieking with them and leaping out of the water. Bec stands on the rocks and barks to let you know he’s watching.

Though you have no more spell ingredients to gather you still travel up and down the coast. You go farther than you normally would just for food. Feferi clings to Bec’s shoulders, laughing, as you race him down deer paths and rocky slopes. She picks flowers and eats them whole while you try to draw them, then burps stray petals straight in your face when you complain. You cook some actual food for her. There is a rare summer rain. You dance patterns in the mud while Feferi claps along. She points out birds excitedly and you tell her their names.

Feferi is also fascinated with the moon. “It changes a little every time it wakes up,” she says, beaming. “And its not so blinding as the sun, which i have to be reminded of in a shock every, um.“ 

She stops and looks at you, and you say, “Morning.” 

“Morning! That’s it.” She gurgles the words in her mouth. You cant help but laugh. Shes so disconnected from time. You tell her this. 

“After all I’ll live for thousands of years,” she says, “if no one kills me.”

“No one will kill you,” you say sharply. 

“Whatever you say,” she answers, careless.

Feferi- can you say suns herself?- on the rocks at the base of the cliff at night under the moons gentle watch. Yours too, because you cant keep away from her. You’re not sure you like it, this insistent pull like a tide.

Tonight shes undoing her braids. You offered her a comb but she almost choked on her laughter. “That’ll break,” she said. “My combs in the palace are ironshell and they lose teeth still.”

You sit with her, ostensibly tracking stars, but you’re flipping your pencil over all your knuckles as you watch her humming mouth. Braid by braid she winds the hair back around itself until all the sections are free, and then she drags her claws through the resulting waves. Waves beneath the rocks sometimes roar up to where you sit; where you squeal and shield your papers, Feferi glitters with the drops on her skin. The violence of the color in her tail mellows under the pale light, and her skin is an icy grey.

When she's done she has a lovely black aura of hair around her body and a hank of the shed in her hand. “It’s pretty strong so i weave some into my shirts,” she explains. “It’s like, the opposite of sea silk, its so thick.”

You cant stop your stupid mouth from saying, “I think its nice.” 

She grins at you. “Human hair is weak and thin!” she says. 

“Is that a compliment?” you ask.

“Figure it out,” she says. 

“You can have some, if you want,” you say, and shock a blush out of her—or you assume that’s what the sudden black on her cheeks is.

“I couldn’t presume,” she huffs.

You swim and run and laugh with her and Bec, feeling ageless.

“It’s been enough time,” you say one morning after noting the number of days in your journal. The air is barely cold from the night. Bec has just brought Feferi up from her tide pool bed, and the both of them are dripping all over the stone. Feferi slides off so Bec can shake himself and you shriek and shield your book.

“It feels like it’s been forever!” Feferi says. “I had a lot of fun. I don’t know if I’ve ever had so much fun, honestly. Where did I leave my trident, do you think?” You don’t think she’s carried it since you used it in the hills.

“If you’re eager to go home, we can do the spell today,” you say. You don’t want her to leave, but you can’t keep her here.

“That would be great,” Feferi says, clambering up on Bec again. “My land plants are probably all dead, ugh. I’ll find all my things!”

Later, you’re both on the beach, Feferi in her armor and clothes and with trident on her back once more, you with magic tome in hand.

“This is a really structured spell, because of its age,” you explain. “So though you’ve helped me with the ingredients and everything, I’m the principal caster. Because of that, the spell needs you to consent to its work.”

Feferi sits in the middle of the sigil you've drawn in the sand, higher on the beach where it won’t be eaten by the waves until the tide change. She has a little bit of the potion smeared on her forehead; the rest you poured in points around her. The ridge on her tail is a little wilted under the noon sun. You chose the time for its power. Sunset could have worked as easily, but you think there's something symbolic in the way shadows have little hold at noon, and magic, of course, thrives off of symbolism.

Feferi aims a thoughtful look at you. The gold of her jewelry and shirt and hair are dazzling, and some of the reflected light makes her eyes look like they are embers after a fire. She looks royal and unspeakably lovely. You ache a liitle under her gaze. You are going to miss her so much that the ache will probably settle in your heart and stay there.

"I want to be safe," she says finally.

Your chest hurts. You say, "Okay, great! So now I can start the incanta-"

"Jade," she says, "You make me feel safe."

"Incantation," you manage, and gulp. "Uh, now."

"Thank you," she says, and closes her eyes.

As you recite the old words from the book, her hair rises like a condor on a hot updraft. The lines in the sand fill in with white light that rivals the shine of the sun. You hear waterfalls. The breaking waves are quiet in comparison. You clap three times, and Feferi cries out.

“Are you okay?” you ask immediately, running over to her, breaking your sigil lines.

She laughs. “I’m okay, Jade.” She presses her hands to the sides of her face. “I just felt something different. The stuff on my forehead is gone? I tasted metal and heard a voice.”

“I think that was me,” you joke, and she sticks out her tongue at you.

“Okay, so, are we testing this, or what?” Feferi says. You feel the warmth drain from your face. Feferi takes your hand. “Jade, it’s fine. Your magic is powerful and your heart is pure.” she says, rubbing your knuckles with her thumb.

You both decided earlier, with some argument, that a gun would probably be the most effective test of the magic. You wanted to err on the side of caution, in case you actually hurt her. Feferi shrugged your concerns off and cited her survival of much worse attacks, which, after seeing her scars, you reluctantly agreed made sense.

You’re still scared. Walking some paces from her, you try to still your heart, and turn around. The gun you raise, not your grandpa’s old favorite but a spare, shakes in your hands.

You see Feferi smiling. “I trust you, Jade,” she says, and you fire.

There’s the barest flash of a crystalline structure in front of her body. You see the bullet drop into the sand.

“See?” she says, as you yip with joy. “I’m sure the hiding component will be just as effective—“ You’ve run back to her and cut her off with a hug. She hugs you back, cold around you. After a few seconds, you try to pull away, but she doesn’t let you go.

Feferi's face is suddenly very close to yours. You think she's going to bite you, that seems like a mermaidy thing to do, but then—

just her lips pressing yours, lightly, the steel of her fangs at the corners of your mouth, and then she withdraws and looks at you. You lick the outside of your mouth. Of course, it tastes like salt.

You consider each other for a while.

"Well, goodbye, Jade," she says. She laughs when you try to pull her close.

"Stupid, I'm coming back! See you later is all," Feferi says, wiggling out of your arms. “I’m a mermaid for a reason, and the reason is that it’s awesome. You can’t change that.” 

“I don’t want to change that,” you say hurriedly. You agree that being a mermaid is likely pretty dope, and the both of you know well without saying what other work Feferi can do in the ocean. “I just wish I could keep you here, with me.”

Feferi tilts her head much like Bec would. She’s probably picked it up from him. 

“Aren’t you keeping me here?” She puts a clawtip on your sternum. Close enough to your heart for a different species, you think, because your brain had to choose the dumbest part of this to focus on.

“And besides,” she says, taking your forearm in her hand, “you’re my byssus!”

You stare at her. “What?”

Feferi grimaces. “My sea silk. I’m being romantic, dummy.”

“Oh!” you say, understanding. “You’re the clam and I’m the excretions that tether you to the rocks!”

“That’s a disgusting way of putting it, but sure,” she confirms. She reaches into her hair and unties a braided cord of gold. After she winds it around your palm, you hold it tightly enough that, light as it is, it digs into your skin. You pluck a few hairs from your own head and she takes them and ties them around her finger.

Feferi touches your face. You let her. She smiles, and rubsyour cheek to smear one of your tears, which she then licks off of her thumb, startling a laugh from you. She whirls away and crashes into the sea with a delighted yell. She surfaces many meters out, turned towards you, glistening under the sun, and then signals you with her trident and disappears.

You look out at the ocean after, for a while. The sound of the sea gnashing its teeth and the smell of salt—of Feferi—blankets your body. The glitter of water is a bit hard on your eyes. You fall backwards, sand puffing up around you. Water tickles your feet periodically. Clouds drift above you, the sand is warm underneath you. Bec patters his way over to you, and you put a hand on him, his fur soft and clean. In your other hand, you run your fingertips over the cord of byssus.

* * *

Many years ago the ocean held you both in her body. You with bones still unfused—you with scales so tender —you met with the weakest spittle of a wave pulling at one, your ankles, the other, your wrists.

Today, reuiniting, your knees are in the water, and her hands crown your head.

**Author's Note:**

> A Ladystuck2020 gift for tumblr user sword-alien and their prompt "jade/fef (either regular or a mermaid au!!)". Thank you for reading! Please leave a comment if you liked it, I really appreciate them! <3


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